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Design viewpoints

Main design viewpoints

At the basis of all those great features lay notions about the design of a school CMS. Over the years the guiding design viewpoints have developed into the following:

• A school CMS must be a place where students can learn. Learn to create and publish texts, learn management tasks and administrative skills, experience markup languages, run and ruin their own style sheets and learn basics of coding. On every level, from writing their first text to writing code, a school CMS must be a learning tool for students.
• The website of a school needs special qualities. It differs from the home site of the Jones family and also it's certainly not the site of an enterprise or a business. A school is not a company. These notions require features that differ from most other (fine) CMS's.
• A school website is the place on the Internet where students, teachers, faculty, parents, the School Board, several committees and other parties can find a place to express themselves and communicate with all kinds of visitors. A school CMS must enable all these stakeholders to use the CMS for their purposes. A school CMS must enable its users to express their cultural differences in the way they express themselves and communicate with their sometimes special audiences.
• Most schools are not that rich. Websites of schools must be managed and maintained by many persons. All of them have little or no experience as webmaster, HTML expert or systems administrator. Often a school is managed by hard working female teachers who like to teach, and not to manage some CMS. These circumstances call for a very secure, robust and stable but KISS (Keep it Simple & Straightforward) CMS for all those users. And, at the same time, it must be possible to construct complicated webshtes with this CMS. kANd, and last but not least eager whizzkids need an opportunity to investigate a secure and robust CMS.
• A school CMS needs excellent documentation, i.e. a comprehensive user manual targeted at teachers and pupils. Furthermore, extensive developer documentation and last but not least, well documented, well written code. All of them written for their respective audiences.
• Visually impaired and blind persons not only have as visitors the right on accessible websites, they also have rights on accesible CMS management.

More information can be found in the manuals (several languages). Please see:
Overview of manuals. Introduction

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